Air quality and health benefits of China’s emission control policies on coal-fired power plants during 2005–2020

Abstract

Coal-fired power plants (CPPs) dominate China's energy supply systems. Over the past two decades, the explosive growth of CPPs has led to negative air quality and health impacts in China, and a series of control policies have been implemented to alleviate those impacts. In this work, by combining a CPPs emission database over China (CPED), a regional chemical transport model (WRF-CMAQ), and the integrated exposure-response model, we summarized historical and ongoing emission control policies on CPPs over China, investigated the air quality and health impacts of China's CPPs during 2005-2020, and quantified the benefits of each policy. We found that despite the 97.4% growth of coal-fired power generation during 2005-2015, PM 2.5 exposures caused by emissions from China's CPPs decreased from 9.0 μg m −3 in 2005 to 3.6 μg m −3 in 2015. The active emission control policies have decreased CPPs-induced PM 2.5 exposures by 10.0 μg m −3 during 2005-2015. We estimated that upgrading end-of-pipe control facilities and early retirement of small and low-efficiency units could respectively reduce PM 2.5 exposures by 7.9 and 2.1 μg m −3 during 2005-2015 and avoid 111 900 and 31 400 annual premature deaths. Since 2015, China's government has further required all CPPs to comply with the so-called 'ultra-low emission standards' before 2020 as a major component of China's clean air actions. If the policy is fully deployed, CPPs-induced PM 2.5 exposures could further decrease by 2.5 μg m −3 and avoid 43 500 premature deaths annually. Our study confirms the effectiveness of tailored control policies for China's CPPs and reveals that those policies have played important roles in air quality improvement in China.

Characteristic and Spatiotemporal Variation of Air Pollution in Northern China Based on Correlation Analysis and Clustering Analysis of Five Air Pollutants

“…While as typical heavy industrial cities, it is impossible for SJZ, Xingtai, Handan, and Anyang to remove their industrial factories. Actually, the above four industrial cities implement the critical ultralow emission standards since 2017 in coal fire power plants, steel, and coking factories (Wu et al, 2019), which led to significant decline of the concentrations of SO 2 . However, the SO 2 emission is inevitable and the ratio of the highest to the lowest monthly concentration are still higher than Beijing, indicating the implementation of policies among different cities, as well as industrial conformation, energy structure and meteorological conditions, affect the concentrations of pollutants (Ma et al, 2015; Zhao & Luo, 2018).…”

Air pollution emissions from Chinese power plants based on the continuous emission monitoring systems network

“…Accompanying with large amounts of fossil energy combustion, China’s thermal power plants have become major sources of air pollutants, emitting 5.0–23.5%, 15.7–38.7% and 19.1–51.5% of China’s anthropogenic particulate matter (PM, defined as microscopic solid or liquid matter suspended in the atmosphere) 3 – 6 , SO 2 4 – 10 and NO X 4 – 11 , respectively, from 2010 to 2017. These air pollutants (representing 5.9%, 23.1% and 21.5% of China’s anthropogenic PM, SO 2 and NO X emissions, respectively, in 2015 5 ), through a series of physical processes and chemical reactions in the atmosphere 12 , contributed to 7.6% of China’s population-weighted PM 2.5 (PM with an aerodynamic diameter of or below 2.5 μm) concentration as of 2015 13 , 14 , leading to severe haze events and human health damage nationwide.…”

“…for each power plant. The CEAP dataset has already been employed to conduct an ex post analysis on the efficacy of the ULE policy in mitigating China’s power emissions 24 and will facilitate further research on the environmental improvements and health benefits associated with the mitigation effect 14 , 24 , 25 , serve policymakers to design future clean air policies 14 , and provide implications for other countries seeking to understand and regulate their power emissions.…”

Emission inventory of air pollutants and chemical speciation for specific anthropogenic sources based on local measurements in the Yangtze River Delta region, China

“…SO 2 and CO emissions were mainly from boilers, accounting for 49 % and 73 % of the total emissions, respectively. Notably, emission contributions from power plants were significantly lower than those from previous inventories (MEIC, http://meicmodel.org/, last access: 15 January 2020; Zhou et al, 2017), resulting mainly from the implementation of stringent emission reduction measures in recent years (Wu et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2019).…”